Saturday 10/21/2023

For fun this Saturday morning I walked across the creek into Menlo Park for coffee at Cafe Zoe. I’ve mentioned doing this a couple of times before, it’s a mile away and not on any of my normal routes.

At 1pm I put on my red docent shirt and headed off to the museum to lead the 2pm tour. About a dozen people, who seemed to enjoy themselves.

At 7:30 we had a dance exhibition by Danse Libre, a local volunteer dance troupe who like to recreate the popular dances of the Regency (i.e. Sense and Sensibility era) and the 1920s. They were very good and put on an entertaining show.

Bert was doing the AV for this one, but he called at 6, they were having a hard time getting their iPad to pair with our system. By the time I got down to the auditorium, they had worked out the problem, and all was well.

Friday 10/20/2023

Yesterday I found the whitefly infestation of my begonias had rebounded from when I sprayed them with neem oil a few days ago. I need more oil and a better sprayer, and I wanted to deal with this first thing. So I started by driving to Home Depot where I bought a small pump sprayer cheap, but couldn’t find the neem oil that was supposed to be in stock. So on around to Summerwinds for that, and home. 9 miles, all on the battery.

Now I could copiously spray under all the leaves of two big begonias. Lots of delicate little white flies flew up and died, mwah-ha-ha. I’ll repeat this in a day or two.

Then I edited the video from EOL session 2, yesterday. I’m getting pretty good at editing video. I was again pleased by my 2-year-old MacBook Pro. Once you have completed editing in iMovie, you export the video to a final .mp4 file. I have done videos on my old (2016) iMac, and I know that to export a one-hour video takes at least one hour. Same job on the MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 chip? Just over 15 minutes. Sucker cranks.

Anyway did that and uploaded it to Vimeo and distributed links to the videos to the people who cared, and it was barely 11am. Damn I’m good. Played a little guitar, at which I am improving. Had lunch. Did some other stuff.

At 3 I started putting together a mismatched set of clothes. The 4th floor has this month’s TGIF and declared it would be “Crimes of Fashion” day — come wearing clothes that should not be worn together. I wore my best fedora with a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals with socks. I was astonished by the eye-hurting combinations my neighbors had put together. Here’s a tiny sample.

Almost everybody who turned up — the penthouse was crowded, so maybe 70 or 80? — had dressed up, or rather down, or maybe sideways. It was amazing and hilarious.

Thursday 10/19/2023

Tidy the apartment, and off to the Shustek center in Milpitas for a day of cataloging documents. Steve and I worked through one entire box of various things. A notable entry was a complete collection of the newsletter of the New Orleans Kaypro User Group, from 1981-83. They put out a 4-page newsletter every month during that time, and somebody had saved them and donated them.

Another item was a lot of notes and careful schematic diagrams, by an MIT e student who in 1973 or so, was trying to reverse-engineer a “blue box,” an analog tone generator then used for getting free long-distance calls.

On the way home I stopped by Jean’s place, mostly to pick up my spare MacBook that I had lent her. She had taken it on a trip to Salt Lake where she used the Mormon’s genealogy study center to try to complete her family trees. I say tried, because she had all her notes on a USB stick and somehow during the trip home, it was wiped. Formatted empty. Disappointing, lost a good part of her work.

On my balcony the white fly infestation has rebounded from my spraying. I sprayed some more but the spray bottle ran out. I will get bigger guns tomorrow.

Wednesday 10/18/2023

Big thing today was to run the AV for session 2 of the End of Life series. My part was to set up the mics, and to smoothly show three different videos on the big screen, and to record the proceedings, including aiming the camera at hopefully the right thing when people were speaking.

It all went quite smoothly. I have the recording but haven’t looked at editing it. I could have started on that this afternoon, but I was a lazy dog and didn’t. One of the videos was a 25 minute documentary from Netflix, Extremis. This is a well-made peek at doctors and relatives trying to des]al with the need to let go and let their loved ones die. Take her off the ventilator? Or do a tracheotomy and put her on a full breathing machine? Tough decisions, and very well shown.

I spent some time with the guitar and it is getting quite clear that my left hand loses sensation in the thumb, first and middle finger, after about 5 minutes of playing. Sensation comes back if I rest it for a couple of minutes.

The questions are: one, is the radial nerve being pinched or inflamed at the elbow? Or in the carpal tunnel? More important: do I want to bother to get a medical person involved? A neurologist? An orthopedist? Or just say, fuck the guitar, I was never that good anyway?

Tuesday 10/17/2023

Took a medium walk because I hadn’t yesterday. (didn’t you used to go to the gym on tuesday mornings? Shut up.) Disposed of a pile of little things on my desk. Credit card bill. Deciding when to do a docent tour this week, and signing up. Sharing an updated zoom event checklist with the AV team.

Then it was writers meeting time. Some really well-written pieces this week on the subject of “changed mind”. I had nothing. Played on the guitar some.

At a certain point I sat down to try to add to that novel. And I just couldn’t. I know what it needs next and I just can’t write it. Which is a stupid thing to say; but it’s a fact. Just very strong resistance to even thinking about it. I must explore this.

Monday 10/16/2023

Started the day, instead of with a walk, by going to the auditorium and practicing some AV things I will have to do on Wednesday in support of the End of Life lecture series, session 2. I also practiced using the new rack-mounted media player to play music through the system using Bluetooth. There is a dance troupe coming in a week or so and they want to bring their music on an iPad.

Then to the Event Coordinators’ meeting. Left that early because my annual nurse’s wellness checkup was at 11am. Or so I thought. When nobody had showed up by 11:15 I called and no, it never was scheduled. They claimed they never got my email acknowledgement. Reschedule. Well, during the time between 9 and then I got Pru’s Sunday@Home video edited and ready to upload.

Then down to FOPAL. Triaged my shelves to remove the books that had seen 4 sales, 3 boxes of them. Also rearranged the shelves a bit, and counted: I sold 66 books at the sale. There were no donations to process, so back early. At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s monthly open meeting. She mainly talked about the annual budget process that starts this month. But also had a surprise announcement: we are going to try out serving robots from Bear Robotics. That should be entertaining. From comments by others I learn that they are already using them at The Sequoias and other places.

Sunday 10/15/2023

Nothing much today. Usual Sunday morning. At 3:30 I supervised Ian as he set up for an event in the auditorium. The event, a “Sunday at Home” which is a series of talks by any resident who has a trip or anything else to talk about. In this case, Pru, who is just back from a 17-day Road Scholar trip around southern Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, some other stops.

The talk was good and the tech worked fine. Ian is trained, I say.

Saturday 10/14/2023

So after I wrote about my hand nerve last night, I did some internet reading. To summarize:

Two nerves provide sensation for the hand. The ulnar nerve serves the ring finger, little finger, and outside edge. The radial nerve serves the thumb, forefinger and middle finger. The radial is my main concern, based on my occasional symptoms.

The two nerves take slightly different paths down the arm, but both pass around the outside of the elbow. (Query to evolution: why? Much better protection on the inner side of the joint!) Stand with your arms hanging, palms forward, thumbs out. The ulnar nerve curves around that sharp bump on the inside of your elbow (the “medial epicondyle”), just where you can smush it by leaning on elbow. The radial comes around the outer bump.

Whatever, both pass through sleeves of tissue at the elbow, and again on the inside of the wrist (the famous carpal tunnel), that can become inflamed. Inflammation seems to be key to most problems with these nerves. Thus NSAIDs are the first line of treatment, and rest and ice. But I discovered there is also stretching exercises called, for no clear reason, “nerve glides” or sometimes “nerve flossing”, I suppose because it’s a boring thing you are supposed to do often, like tooth flossing. But there are tons of articles and YT vids on “glide” exercises for different nerves, and a radial nerve glide is a pretty simple thing (example) so I’m going to do some.

I had no symptoms from my two shots yesterday. Normal temperature. Slight tenderness in each bicep. Well that was this morning. In the evening I feel just the tiniest bit under the weather. Think I shall go to bed early.

On this quite open day, I joined Dennis for lunch. We went to The Lazy Dog, which turns out to be a chain (I checked online later), specializing in comfort food from all sorts of cuisines. It was a bit too noisy for comfort, and they messed up Dennis’s order, so — not recommended.

Friday 10/13/2023

Took the standard walk, ending at CVS on University at 10am, early for my appointment. But after a short wait I got my Covid shot in the left arm, and an RSV shot in the right.

At 12 I took off for Shoreline near the CHM, to meet Scott and Denny for lunch and nostalgia talk. Their past lives are SO much more interesting than mine. Although they agreed that by not having to be in the military, I was fortunate. Fortunate, maybe, but with a lot fewer amusing recollections.

A couple of times today I played on the guitar. This is going well in one sense, in that stuff I used to know is coming back, and my left hand calluses are reforming making it a lot less painful to fret the strings. I’ve also been exercising my left hand with an exerciser thingy to increase grip strength, and as a result I can almost do barre chords again. Playing “Puff the Magic Dragon” and I can do the G-B♭-C-D sequence as barre chords. Almost. Sometimes.

But there’s another problem. I’ve got some kind of nerve entrapment going on in the area of my left elbow. After about 10 minutes of playing, my left thumb and forefinger and middle finger lose feeling, “go to sleep”. I have to straighten my arm out to get feeling back. The same thing happens when I use my computer propped on my stomach, with my arms bent up to the keyboard. I’m not sure what I want to do about this. Seek medical advice I suppose. Sigh.

Thursday 10/12/2023

Tidied the apartment, then drove to the Shustek center in Milpitas. I and Steve spent most of the day cataloging the many parts of a development prototype of the Amazon Echo. One of the engineers who developed the Echo donated two prototypes, one complete and the other torn down into its various parts, and we had recorded an interview in which he explained each of the parts and how they fit together. So we were able to do a thorough job of cataloging all the bits.

I was impressed with the quality of the parts in the Echo, and the depth of the engineering in it. I’ve never owned one, never said “Hey, Alexa”. But the machine is built very well, especially the audio parts. They put a lot of thought into getting decent sound out of a 3-inch-wide, 8-inch tall cylinder. There is a woofer, only 3 inches across but with a magnet that weighs over a pound in a tuned acoustic resonance tube; plus a midrange speaker also with a chunky little magnet. There are seven tiny little microphones, little gold cubes no more than a 16th of an inch on a side. And other nice details.